Walt
Hearn suggested to me that since I am an ASA member teaching at the University
of Mississippi, I might want to give other members my impressions of the events
related to the riot which took place on our campus last Sunday, September 30.
Walt is particularly interested-and he thinks others in the ASA are also
interested-in what leadership, if any, Christians have given.

The
information I have has been collected over the slightly more than four years I
have been on this campus. At that opening faculty meeting four years ago we were
told the segregation-integration fight was not ours, but a fight between the
state government and the federal government. We were advised rather strongly to
teach our subject matter, not to poll students, and not to get into the fight in
any way. It seemed clear then that this advice was given because doing any of
these things would help the cause of the integrationist; those in power in the
state would surely welcome anything which bolstered the argument for segregation,
no matter how far from his professional duties a staff member might stray.
Actually, contrary to this advice some have polled their students every year and
they have found students apathetic on the question of the entry of a Negro into
the university. This would not be pleasant news for the segregationist.

Over this
four year period the "advice" given at that first faculty meeting has
been repeated many times and at the same time has been made stronger. A year
ago, for example, the faculty were told to be careful even in private
conversations. These warnings were made against the background of several small,
but meaningful incidents: a law professor is denied tenure because he stated
publicly Supreme Court decisions are the law of the land; a colored opera star
is not allowed to perform on campus; an entertainer who is discovered to have
pro-NAACP leanings is prevented from fulfilling his engagement and so on and on.
Because of all these things, tensions have been mounting and as this is being
written (Oct. 6), there are many more soldiers than civilians in the Oxford
area. Apparently only they can keep the peace.

Why had the
"advice" been given? Why has the NAACP made its first serious
Mississippi effort at this particular university? I believe the answers to these
two questions are related. The white population of Mississippi is not large
(about a million) and there is an unbelievably large number of intermarriages
generation after generation. These people are related by blood and culture.
However, those among them who are better off economically have apparently
decided that the University of Mississippi is the most fashionable of the
universities and colleges in the state. But the large majority of the faculty at
the University of Mississippi have origins outside the state, many even outside
the South. Thus, this is just the faculty that is "dangerous" in the
segregationist sense; probably this university is the one place in the state
that can "infect" the state with Northern radical (i.e., integration)
sentiments by influencing the young of the most prominent families in the state.
I am not surprised that the NAACP and the Mississippi aristocracy have met
head-on at the University of Mississippi.

Where have
the Christians been in this clash? I don't like to say what I must say. Several
days before the riot of last Sunday several ministers of the area published a
sensible statement urging moderation; most of the evangelically minded ministers
did not openly, at least, endorse the statement. On the Sunday morning of the
riot one minister urged people to be calm even as he rather brazenly referred to
atheistic, socialistic ideas which have infiltrated the state from the outside.
On the same morning a prominent evangelical minister used the theme that change
in life is inevitable, but it was probably far too tender a treatment to have
much effect on the rocks and bullets that were used that evening. I believe he
did not say anything about the crisis itself. On the other hand, two ministers I
would consider liberals were on the campus during the riot taking rocks out of
the hands of rioters.

On the
campus itself what little opposition there has been to racist ideas has come
largely from professors who would probably not classify themselves as
evangelicals. I hope and pray that I am the exception. The faculty is somewhat
like the faculty of any Northern university in that respect: there are only a
few evangelicals, and those most active in defending civil rights are those who
are, in general, less active in church work. Thus, the tension existing between
the faculty and the Mississippi whites is not made less when one considers that
Protestantism is as strong in this state as it is anywhere. ASA members will be
interested to learn that when a group in the state two years ago engaged in a
long, public, noisy attack on the university, they found as its worst sins that
it taught integration and evolution! My own regrets are that if it has been
able to teach integration, it has surely been by smuggling, and that it has had
no trouble in teaching evolution.

The center
of any integrationist influence on the faculty has been the local chapter of the
American Association of University Professors, comprising about one-fourth of
the faculty. This group had enough eyewitness evidence of the riot so that it
could, three days after the riot, issue a public and widely circulated statement
testifying that the mob, not the federal marshals, started the riot. This was an
important statement because the state officials have been claiming the reverse.
In addition, the statement said that the law as interpreted by the Supreme Court
should be obeyed and that everyone should encourage others to obey the law. It
is rather sad to consider that these statements, which are hardly stronger than
platitudes, will be considered by many to be inflammatory. I am happy to have
been one of the signers of this AAUP statement. It is interesting to note that
the car of one of the outspoken AAUP members was one of the many destroyed by
fire in the riot. What an evangelical student said to me was to the effect that
this man had it coming.

This last
comment suggests that the deaths and injuries of the riot seem not to have
changed people's minds. I fear this is all too true. The university is making an
obvious effort to exonerate all but one or two students, even though many
persons, and I am one of them, saw hundreds saying and doing threatening things,
at least at the beginning of the riot. (Students were not threatened with
punishment during either the two-week buildup of tension or the riot itself.)
Professors are "encouraged" officially and unofficially by the school
administration not to make statements like the AAUP statement-probably by far
the most daring statement ever proceeding from a faculty group here. There is a
tremendous effort being made to minimize what actually happened-"only two
people were killed"; "not much damage to university property,"
etc. Actually, about two hundred were injured and dozens of them were by gunshot
wounds. A friend of mine, a professor who was trying to prevent students from
destroying a newsman's camera and who was beaten by the students as the state
police pulled him away and encouraged the students to continue with the camera,
does not feel we should minimize what happened! (This incident took place at the
very beginning of the riot before the marshals fought and just before the
hundreds of state police were removed from the campus and dozens-perhaps
hundreds-of outsiders who were armed entered the campus.) Naturally, in all
fairness I should add that state and university policy has not changed the minds
of those who are opposed to that policy; the lines are drawn pretty much as they
were before the strife.

As a
chemist, I have concluded that the social scientists have some tough problems to
study! I think I have been living in one of their more interesting laboratories.
Please pray for this strife-tom area. We know that men on both sides of the
struggle have been attempting solutions made entirely from the mind of man,
without God and without the heart-cleansing which they can receive from His Son.
We also know this method will not succeed.